The Black Prince (Vintage Classics Murdoch Series)

by Iris Murdoch

I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already ‘done’ them: not because they were bad, but because they already belonged to the past and I had lost interest. My thoughts were soon stale to me. Some things I ruined by starting them too soon. Others by thinking them so intensely in my head that they were over before they began. Projects would change in a second from hazy uncommitted dreams into unsalvageable ancient history.

It's hard not to sympathise with this observation on my, though I wonder if this is how Iris Murdoch felt about it, or just her character Bradley? I have a collection of Murdoch's letters to read one day, the answer may be in there.

We forgive those who have seen us vile sooner than those who have seen us humiliated.

We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

‘You mustn’t mind so much. It’s all in your head.’ ‘Well, I live in my head.

When we do ill we anaesthetize our imagination. Doubtless this is, for most people, a prerequisite of doing ill, and indeed a part of it.

There's some insight here that's as relevant now, in a world of radicalised individuals giving over their insight and imagination to others, as when it was written.

But I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.

In one paragraph Arnold Baffin becomes much more sympathetic as a character, as he describes a writing process completely different to Bradley's, but no more artistically satisfying.

the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good.

Ouch!

Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego’s natural activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life-long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage.

War and concentration camps seemingly equated with family and marriage!

any artist knows that the space between the stage where the work is too unformed to have committed itself and the stage where it is too late to improve it can be as thin as a needle.

Another great observation on creativity.

Of course the mind of the lover abhors accident.

Everything happens for a reason when you're in love.

‘She’s like all of them now, so vague and inconsiderate and doing everything on the spur of the moment, and so full of contempt for everything.

It seems even in the seventies, middle-aged people complained about young people.

She was looking at me in the cool north indigo duskiness of the room with such a humble pleading diffident rueful tender look upon her face, and her drooping hands were opened to me in a sort of Oriental gesture of abandonment and homage.

Piling up the adjectives!

Selection of a place to be sick in is always a matter of personal importance and can add an extra tormenting dimension to the graceless horror of vomiting.

Ms Murdoch even had insights on vomiting!

Vomiting is a curious experience, entirely sui generis. It is involuntary in a peculiarly shocking way, the body suddenly doing something very unusual with great promptness and decision. One cannot argue. One is seized.